Abstract
This paper is an investigation into Taiwan’s policy on nuclear waste disposal, concentrating on the ways in which dumping sites have been chosen, and on the wider implications of those choices. The central aim was to examine whether this policy breached the distributive and procedural principles of environmental justice by discriminating against disadvantaged areas and minority ethnic groups. The paper first clarifies the meaning of environmental justice and then applies it to the case study of Taiwan’s decision announced in 2009 that Da-Ren (達仁鄉) in Taitung County (台東縣) and Wang-An (望安鄉) in Penghu County (澎湖縣) were its two favoured potential sites for the final disposal repository of radioactive waste. The findings of the research suggest that the Taiwan government and the nuclear power provider, Taipower, failed to fulfil the requirements of environmental justice in reaching this decision. The contribution of this case study to the literature on the environmental injustice of nuclear waste siting policies is fourfold. First, it adds to the growing number of studies that show how siting decisions systematically and deliberately disadvantage vulnerable communities. Second, it finds the basis of this discriminatory policy to lie in the wider pattern of inequality that exists in Taiwanese society—a pattern that is rooted in historical traditions of racial and tribal prejudice, reinforced by contemporary forms of corruption. Third, it suggests that a solution to the problem of environmental injustice in nuclear waste siting policy may have to wait until these broader practices of unequal treatment in Taiwan are addressed. Fourth, it speculates that the need for a solution to the nuclear waste problem may be a catalyst for dealing with these broader patterns of unequal treatment.
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Notes
The case study is exclusively concerned with the siting of low level-nuclear waste in Taiwan, though local people were worried that other types of waste might also be stored in such sites.
An interesting implication of demands for local control over decision-making is that communities could choose to accept nuclear waste siting, which happened in 1996 when the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians decided to host a high-level radioactive waste facility on their reservation in Tooele County, Utah (Ishiyama 2003). Of course, as Ishiyama (2003) points out, even that decision could be interpreted as a consequence of environmental injustice, since the historic discrimination against the Goshute Indians left them with no other economic options.
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Huang, G.CL., Gray, T. & Bell, D. Environmental justice of nuclear waste policy in Taiwan: Taipower, government, and local community. Environ Dev Sustain 15, 1555–1571 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-013-9461-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-013-9461-1